The smoke having cleared by Saturday, Oct. 14, it was balmy in the Mission District for Lit Crawl, a traditional closing event for Litquake. As always, lovers of literature strolled between venues. Valencia Street parklets became oases, where people could sit a spell, enjoy ice cream cones, greet passing friends.

We’d started out with “Writers on the Verge: Litquake’s Writing Contest Winners,” a reading at Samovar, between 5-6 p.m., when the sun was still bright. By 4:45, it was clear the gathering crowd was bigger than the venue. The microphone was brought outside, and people stood in a semicircle, lounging in the parklet, leaning against the building. The crowd was bisected by passersby making their ways to and fro: a couple carrying a sofa, a boy with black chihuahua tethered to his bike, riding down the middle of the sidewalk. Two stories above, a man leaned out of his apartment window, watching and listening.

When the event began, the mike was spotty, but the stories — by Teck Sway-Bien, Sage Curtis, Lucy Gray, Mary Ladd, Olga Zilberbourg and Maria Zilberman — were engrossing. Along with the carefully crafted phrases in the stories, a countermelody of Valencia Street traffic noises played in the background. Motorcycles zoomed by, low-riders revved their engines, music wafted from open car windows, trucks idled at the traffic light, and “get out of the street, jackass” was shouted at perhaps a pedestrian, maybe a bicyclist, or more likely an audience member so drunk on prose that safety was forgotten in the search for a listening post.

“Closer to the mike,” it was said, while writers shared intimate tales of family, puberty, sexual identity, coping with illness. A few feet away, the city roared on.

More from Leah Garchik

•On Oct. 8, when Kaiser Permanente Vacaville surgeon Kenny Omlin saw flames outside his vineyard/compound in Napa, he realized he needed to get his family — wife and two children, one a year old and the other only 10 days old, plus elderly parents and a brother — out of the compound immediately. He drove to his iron front gate to see if he could open it manually, but it was electric, and as he’d suspected, he couldn’t. He drove back to the house, where his 86-year-old dad, Karl, a retired truck driver, suggested that he remove the cover from the motor control box to move the belt manually with his hand. It worked. “I don’t know what we would have done if my father hadn’t said that,” Omlin told The Chronicle’s Steve Rubenstein. “Here I am a surgeon — educated, medical school, all that — and it doesn’t mean squat. I wouldn’t have known what to do without my father. Give me a scalpel and I’d have known what to do.” The family escaped to a babysitter’s house in Napa.

•In San Francisco, first thing on Thursday, Oct. 12, while fires were raging to the North, Tim Wu attempted to buy an air purifying device for himself, and one for his elderly mother. The hardware store that had just received a shipment would sell him only one, said the clerk. An argument ensued, the clerk threatening to call police on Wu. At which point, a Good Samaritan in the checkout line to buy something else stepped forward to tell him she’d buy it for him, and he could pay her back. And that’s the art of the deal.

•The Sonoma County Gazette, reports Randy Alfred, told readers on Sept. 27 that Fire Prevention Week would be Oct. 8-14, and that fire departments in various places would ge giving away candy for kids and hosting the public for dinners and breakfasts.

Time now for some jokes, any jokes, even old jokes — 26 years old to be exact. Frequent contributor Matt Regan used to freelance comedy lines for Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.” He just came across a sheet of jokes he had written in 1991, based on the news that Donald Trump had proposed to Marla Maples. At the time, recalls Regan, Trump was “known as a debt-ridden tightwad”:

“Trump’s proposal to Marla surprised him, too. See, he got down on one knee to pick up a penny, and one thing led to another”; “Trump owes so many people, the couple’s new towels are going to read ‘Hers’ and ‘Theirs.’”

Leah Garchik washed up on the shores of Fifth and Mission in 1972, began her duties as a part-time temporary steno clerk, and ascended the journalistic ladder. Over the years, she has served as writer, reviewer, editor and columnist. She is the author of two books, “San Francisco: Its Sights and Secrets” and “Real Life Romance."

She is an avid knitter, a terrible accordion player, a sporadic tweeter and a pretty good speller.